this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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This information is sold on some apps, though matching is a good enough proxy on tindr-likes if I follow how they work (I've only used one and, uh, never really understood it)
I think they usually link through DMs, usually about 5 rounds in
I want you to just spend another couple of minutes thinking this through. Let's imagine counterfactually that it had any basis in reality (and wasn't, like, credit card scams, chaturbate-style sites, and so on) and that these were individually operating people who wanted to do prostitution or something. That's a bunch of small businesses. What does capital do over time? It centralizes. Soon, it would be overrun by enterprises at scale that pushed independent prostitutes to the margins (this happens with traditional prostitution in most contexts as well, though there are legal countermeasures for it in some societies) because fewer centralized businesses are going to be better at repeatedly accomplishing an extremely repetitive task over and over. The same thing has also played out with scams, with a trend towards "businesses" running telephone farms and eventually bot farms, etc. Eventually, and by that I mean within the span of less than a decade, you would just get more digital pimping than we already have, not some ancap utopia of freelance girlbosses like you're imagining.
There are aspects of the transition to new(ish) means of production that can temporarily serve to better human conditions, but any sort of development in productive capacity (which is all this amounts to) is just going to be "disruption" bullshit, i.e. the replacing of one monopoly with another. It is only by changing the relations of production that society can take a fundamentally better shape, here or in any other facet of life. A more advanced computer in the hands of the same master (or in reach of the same master) is just a more sophisticated means of oppression in the long run, and nowhere is that truer than under capitalism, where the pressure to expand pushes everyone towards monopoly in all markets.
Any time
If there’s enough profit in running these schemes/scams then I imagine there are people who have written ways to hook into the apps and can feed the bots all relevant info needed. Granted I feel like finding some kind of niche in the online gaming world to bot/rmt is probably less ethically compromising but I have no idea what the profit aspect looks like on these kinds of grifts.
(One day I’ll write about how 21year old me wrote a bot for a classic EverQuest server for beer money and post it here, but not today)